The Chinese have been advertising their “homegrown technology” as the country pushes aggressively to build up technological self-reliance amid trade conflicts with the US.

Liu Lei, a research fellow at the Institute at Computing Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state news agency China News Service Wednesday that he and his team had released a “fully autonomously designed” programming language.

Dubbed Mulan, or Module Unit Language, had been invented to fit “the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) applications”, according to Liu.

He also claimed that Mulan was compatible with mainstream operating systems such as Android, iOS, Linux, and Windows.

However late last week when users discovered that most of Mulan’s code was from Python, a 29 year old open-source programming language created by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum.

Liu apologised (in Chinese) for his exaggerations, admitting that a part of the compiler was redeveloped based on Python and that the language had actually been designed to teach coding to primary and secondary school-age children, rather than to be used for AI and IoT applications.

The ICT said in a statement (in Chinese) Sunday that Liu’s claims contained “false accounts” and that the institute had suspended him.